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Author
Topic: The Cruelest Month (Read 10087 times)

April 17 will mark the fifteenth year of the death of my french lover, Jean-Marc Jarrouse. He was 34.

Every year since 1992 my chest is reopened and the old wound is reexposed, toyed with and made to bleed again as if it were only yesterday. The more I try to ignore it, the worse it feels, but in acknowledging it I find no peace either. So it simply is.

I had loved greatly before we met in a bar in Spain in 1990 and fell in love on the beach, but never enough to disavow my previous life. I have loved since but never with that part of my soul reserved for his consumption exclusively. I am in love now and hope to offer a similar, but different piece to him because I know I am still capable of such things, although I've avoided it out of fear of pain. I am fabulously optimistic about the future. But my mid-April horror comes without fail and derails me for a short time, and I'm grateful that he's not here to see it.

Jean-Marc was beautiful, intelligent, funny, indescribably generous and capable of the deepest love. He was also a habitual liar, mercurial and exacting, occasionally cruel. He had more demons than anyone I've ever met, and I became intimately acquainted with them all.

If the utter pathos of his death occasionally obscures the real man inside, it is never for long. The parts of my brain that hold memories of those two years we had together never stills. And his shade has never left me, even if sometimes it feels that way. I must say that he makes a shitty guardian angel, but that was never his responsibility to me so I cannot complain, not really.

Writing about him is indescribably hard, especially if I want to write about him truthfully. But when I first found my sea-legs as a writer I was able to grind out five chapters and posted them on The Spin Cycle. I started the first chapter with a short quote from a Jacques Brel song:

On n'oublie rien de rienOn s'habitue, c'est tout

We forget nothing of anythingWe just get used to it [habituate ourselves], that's all

BrentWe all have our own unique ways of expressing and coping with the grief that surrounds the loss of a partner...... not just a "loved one" but a "life partner"....someone who was so much a part of your life that going on seemed impossible after their death. My former partner died on April 4th (1995) and he was cremated on April 6 which is my birthday. I cannot express in words the way my heart was wrenched out of my body. It was made even worse because he was not able to come to terms with the fact that he was dying. He fought up to the last minute. My last conversation with him went something like this:Me: P., Is there anything you would like to talk about with me? I think you and I need to talk before you die. Him: I just want to be well enough to attend my parents 50th anniversary party next year. End of conversation.We were together for 14 years. He was sick for 7 of those years. Although I try to have good memories about our time together, it is difficult because he was ill for so long. He lost everything he owned....and what I had helped him build. He lost his health , then his business. After his PCP recovery, he poured all his energy into building a GLBT Marching Band. It became the only one Philadelphia ever had. ( Does not exist any more.) They marched in gay pride parades here, in NYC and in Denver . He became the President of the Philadelphia Gay Mens Chorus. He had PCP when we went to Seattle to perform. He was hospitalized as soon as we returned.And so.....I joined a support group for "Lovers and Friends of People With AIDS". When he died, we formed the Philadelphia chapter of AIDS widows. ( No we didnt I was just kidding.)edited to add: Doesnt this belong in the Long Time Survivors forum.....oh the confusion.

Bucko, I think of Jimmie just about every day. To this day, whenever I smell a guys hair, I think of the moment I fell in love with that troubled boy.

And almost every pair of boots I own were inherited by me from my beloved little skater punk boot black, Thomas, whose conversation, friendship and love I will miss most of all. And I can barely write these two sentences without tears even after many years.

April 17, by the way, is also the day Thomas died.

Logged

Floating through the void in the caress of two giant pink lobsters named Esmerelda and Keith.

Bear-I appreciate your sharing your story. I know that you honor his memory.

Puck-I read somewhere that oftentimes people make it through winter only to pass in the spring. April is a troubling month for we who are left behind.

For the last few months of JM's life, I attended a smallish group in Paris for "Those effected with HIV/AIDS and who speak English". It was mostly expat Americans with a smattering of Brits. I was the only one who was there for support as a caregiver rather than a PWA (my status went unknown until 1996, when I got sick and tested poz).

Needless to say, the group was very ambivalent about my presence there. At times I was lionized for my total dedication to keeping his dignity intact. But there was always a fierce debate as regards my stance on any attempt to bring him home to die. The other members thought that our apartment was his to have and use as he saw fit.

But I saw it as my only sanctuary, the only place left for me. And as poor JM had no reasoning abilities left, his wishes were secondary to my own. Besides, the hospital administration were the ones doing all the pushing for him to return home to die. His family was manipulated into thinking (against their own obvious ability to see with their own eyes) that he was going home to live. They wanted to believe the impossible, as did members of the group.

The home health care was a disaster and ended less than a week after it started. I felt that a hospice was the only humane place for him to die, but at that point hospice care for AIDS patients wasn't done except on a very special case basis. It was my responsibility to prove that such was JM's case and eventually succeeded.

I remember someone in the group yelling at me with contempt that I was being selfish, that the apartment was his. I responded this way:

"He also has a closet full of suits. Should we pull the trousers over his diapers just to show that he can still wear them?"

No one wanted to recognize the truth. But I had to, and did. In the end he died in a hospice with me by his side. I'd kept a vigil for over 36 hours and he passed while I dozed for a moment.

Back in the darkest parts of February, when he was relating hallucinations of men in black coming through his TV screen, I had a very clear dream on night. I saw an image of a bulletin board and one of those peel-away calendars where each page is another day. The date was very clear: April 15.

The facilitator of the group and I discussed this dream in one of several private sessions he had with me. When he asked me what I thought it represented, i truthfully said that I hadn't a clue.

On April 15, 1992 I went to the hospice as I had every other day. We passed an uneventful morning and I fed him lunch and he took a nap. They had a tradition of mid-afternoon tea which JM found very "civilized" and consisted of a hot cup of tea with a couple of shortbread cookies. he always insisted that I eat his cookies, as he no longer had his bottom teeth and could no longer chew them.

He was too weak to lift the cup alone, so I helped him with it. He was nothing left but enormous brown eyes and some stray hairs. In the middle of tea, he looked up brightly suddenly, then slumped over, his gut releasing everything into his bed. He was in a coma.

The family was called, and they all made their appearances, but JM stubbornly refused to pass in their presence, so they eventually left. I promised I'd call if anything changed and pulled up a chair where I sat throughout two nights, holding his hand and singing the little songs he always loved so much. I wouldn't leave so the staff brought me food and saline solution for my contacts.

As I wrote above, he finally let go while I was momentarily dozing in the chair at his bedside.

When a hospice worker woke me up and told me the news, I went out to the lobby for a smoke then back upstairs to find that they were washing him one last time in the immersion bath. Looking around his room I noticed that there was a bulletin board on the wall opposite his bed. It had been covered with papers and folders. When they'd taken all that stuff down, a calendar was exposed, with the date of April 15.

Brent(Who remembers it all clearly)

Logged

Blessed with brains, talent and gorgeous tits.

The revolutionary smart set reads The Spin Cycle at least once every day.

Ahhh Love. Where is it written that it gives thousands of joy, but millions of pain. Where is it written that love is like a wonderful sparkling sun lite doorway so open that it nevers closes and yet, once it ends, that same doorway is dark and inexplicitly melancholy bleak in a house continuingly crashing down. Who knew that love lasts forever and the pain, the painful emotions, the painful memories of that never ending of what is, what was, what could have been, and what will never be last even longer. In the short time of my love, I allowed him to be engraved into my heart and soul and never once thought the true meaning of that action. The consequences... The cruelest quote ever written was, "better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all." I will never regret our time and our happy to happiest moments, but to live without him put a strained on my existence. So I live in his memories, for his memories and because of his memories. I also live each day in hope to forget alittle and live even more. So let me end by hating him for leaving my life. So let me end for not ever knowing that Love had meant so much and for giving away my heart. And let me begin again....

When I first signed on to Aidsmeds.com forum....I had just lost my David and you were one of a handful of people here on the forum who tried to nurture me as the grief process began....I dare say you gave me comfort many nights anddespite how painful it must've been for you...you provided genuine and meaningful support. Your writings allowed me to lookinto the window of your soul and see the pain and yes, the joy too that your love affair with Jean Marc provided. Like David's deathwas to me...Jean Marc's was to you and somehow realizing that others had suffered the same tragedy, understood my pain and thedesolation I felt, allowed me to begin the process of healing the open wound in my chest. I only wish there was something I couldsay, or do or write that would give you comfort today....for surely you touched me in a way, provided solace where there was none,and gave me a second chance to live again. My thoughts are with you this month.... but you will forever have my heart.

"Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful nor conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins, but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes." - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, adaptation in A Walk To Remember

Bucko, you story brings many emotions for me... I am going to refrain from uttering meaningless cliches of condolence. The tear streaming down my face is enough.

What I will say is that the world is a better place because there are people like you in it, not because you stood by your partner, not because you loved him, but because you have learned to express your love and your pain with an eloquence that transmits that love across distances and into the heads of people who really do understand, and who want to remember as well.

Logged

Floating through the void in the caress of two giant pink lobsters named Esmerelda and Keith.

Andy-Brel's poetry defies translation as he seemed to always choose words and phrases freighted with connotations and puns. But mine at least follow the sense of what he meant, if without the concise edge.

Red-Beautiful words, beautifully expressed...thank you.

David-Your grief was still very fresh when we met here, and I recognized all the emotions you were enduring. I'm so glad to have helped, and in the process it allowed me to sublimate my own tortures. You are a true friend.

JM hadn't many friends, but the few he had were of a very special character. They were smart and funny and wise. The guy who cut his hair was the one I liked the best. His name was Christian, who was very droll in an uncharacteristically French kind of way.

When JM and I had an argument (a very common occurrence in our home), I would occasionally call Christian to see if I could come by for a visit, which he would always welcome. In the early days we would speak mostly in English, but as time passed (and my French grew better), we rarely used it any more. He disliked speaking English, he told me, because he once had a Dutch lover and they used to reserve English for fights.

During his final decline, JM refused to allow any of his friends to see him, which hurt them tremendously. I attempted to stay in touch with a few, but they rather resented my place in his life and I eventually stopped trying, except for Christian, with whom I kept a special rapport. Once he was installed in the hospice, JM required less of my time (in the hospital I arrived at 10:00 in the morning and never left before 7:30, frequently later). Where before he would get jealous of my time spent away, especially at the group, he actually encouraged me to spend less time with him.

The first time I saw him accepting food from a volunteer at the hospice I broke down and needed the support of one of their counsellors. He would look up at me with those enormous eyes, and as sternly as he could muster insist that i had better things to do. It wasn't a rejection, it was an acknowledgement of both my uncompromising service to him and the fact that I should look after myself better.

I called Christian and asked simply if I could come over, without explanation. When I arrived, I poured out my heart, and he quickly understood the gravity of everything. He held me close and we allowed me to weep and carry on as I'd been unable to do except in private. Without saying much, he let me stay with him, cooking me food and snuggling at night. I'm not sure how I could have made it without him. He provided exactly what I needed when I needed it most, and let me rail on whenever it was required.

I would go back to our apartment to collect clothing but never spent another night there.

A few days after he passed, I stopped by the apartment to collect something, just for a moment. I was passing through the foyer toward the living room when, as clear as a bell, I heard JM's voice saying my name in an impatient whisper. Shocked and horrified, I fell to the floor and implored him to leave this plane and find the light. I cannot recall how long I was down there in an indescribable agony, nor what else I did that evening. When i described it to Christian, he told me to forget it, but I've never been able to.

I had many options to stay in Paris. Christian would have let me stay with him indefinitely. A beautiful young woman offered to marry me for my papers (I was illegal the whole time I was there). JM's family was anxious to hold on to me. But I needed my sister and returned to Boston the day after the funeral. I remember ironing a shirt in the living room, listening to a CD I especially enjoyed, singing along, feeling momentarily stable and peaceful, when a song called Verdi Cries came on:

The man in 119 takes his tea all alone.Mornings we all rise to wireless Verdi cries.I'm hearing opera through the door.The souls of men and women, impassioned all.Their voices climb and fall; battle trumpets call.I fill the bath and climb inside, singing.

He will not touch their pastrybut every day they bring him more.Gold from the breakfast tray, I steal them all awayand then go and eat them on the shore.

I draw a jackal-headed woman in the sand,sing of a lover's fate sealed by jealous hatethen wash my hand in the sea.With just three days more I'd have just about learned the entire score to Aida.

Holidays must end as you know.All is memory taken home with me:the opera, the stolen tea, the sand drawing, the verging sea, all years ago.

I'd heard the song many dozens of times before, but it caught me off guard. Tears sprung and fell of their own accord and i leaned on the ironing board to catch a breath that never came.

Logged

Blessed with brains, talent and gorgeous tits.

The revolutionary smart set reads The Spin Cycle at least once every day.

Beautiful words Brent. I hope saying them brings you some closeness to JM and some peace. Since we are relating our experiences here, I would like to say that I became much more spiritual after my partner died. No, not religious. But able to accept the mysteries of life and not try to close them out or deny them. Your hearing his voice I totally accept. I am sure you did. In my dreams I have a very rich encounter with all kinds of emotions and experiences. After the death of my partner, I had a very vivid dream wherein he was in great torment. No, not his physical body but his spirit. I have never forgotten that. But even more amazing was, a year later, when I had another dream about him that was totally the opposite. He was calm and serene and had a message for me. Those are the only two dreams I had about him, specifically, after he died. None since then. Thank you for sharing your experience Brent.

Matt, Christine and Cerrid-Thank you for the support. It means a great deal to me right now.

Bear-Your post makes me want to discuss the dreams:

About once every twelve to eighteen months I'll have what I have come to call "the cruelest dream". I'm not sure why it is, but I tend to have dreams recur in specific locales which are not real places, although they contain many elements of real places I've been to. They are inevitably urban places teeming with people.

The beginnings are different, but they degenerate into dreams of panic and pursuit, with me actively attempting to avoid some dreadful unnamed thing or group of people. At the end I'm confronted by an implacable and angry JM, sometimes alone but frequently accompanied by two of his four sisters, the two with whom I was closest. He looks dreadful but has somehow survived and is harsh with me for having abandoned him. My response is always the same: "But you died."

The emotion during these dreams runs like a chemical through me and I wake up sobbing.

These must be projections of my subconscious because I know that he died, I was there. He passed just before Holy Week and had to kept in the morgue for a week before the mass his mother wanted so badly could be done for him. The day of the funeral they had a viewing, which I attended despite my better inclinations. His skin had shrunk in his face, opening his eyes and exposing his top teeth. He weighed 36 kilos (appx 73 lbs).

He was most definitely dead.

I don't believe that these are visitations. They are horrors of guilt and loss. They are an artifact of growing up never quite having done enough to merit full, unconditional approval and I know that. But these dreams are incredibly vivid and haunt me for days afterward.

My recollections of the actual funeral are sketchy. I remember wearing one of JM's black suits (which was too small) and a pair of enormous Doc Martin steel-toed boots. After the viewing, we went to his mother's apartment in a suburb east of the city. I remember his grandfather brought a small plaque engraved with JM's name and will never forget the look of incredible loss on his face. We held each other weeping in each other's arms.

I did not take communion, which caused something of a stir. I just sat in the front row and sobbed.

For some reason (perhaps cultural, who knows?), we all followed the hearse on foot from the church to the cemetery, forming a terrible little parade down the street. I was literally carried by two of the sisters (the two not in the dreams, incidentally) by the arms. They held and carried me along the way as I would have dropped left to myself.

The actual grave was poured cement and filled with earth and covered with white stones. The grandfather's plaque was placed on top until the family could raise enough money for a proper stone. I sat on the curb of the grave for a long time, spent and numb, contemplating the white dust on my black leather boots. I remember one of the brothers-in-law pulling me up and taking me out.

There was food at his mother's later. Chairs were arranged in a circle and I was given pride of place, where aunts and uncles and cousins I'd never met regarded me with an odd mix of fear and contempt and pity. A nephew whom I knew well, a toddler, came over to me and wanted to sit in my lap. When I went to pick him up several of these strangers to me made shocked breathing noises and one of them yelled to his mother that I should not be handling children. This led to a vociferous argument and I was driven home (to Christian's, actually) shortly thereafter.

I have no memory of anything between the drive back to Paris and my arrival at Boston's Logan airport the next day, when the customs official asked me what my business in Paris had been. I began relating the last six months of my life stammering between tears. He handed me back my passport, touched my arm and welcomed me home.

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Blessed with brains, talent and gorgeous tits.

The revolutionary smart set reads The Spin Cycle at least once every day.

My Love goes out to you this week, I cannot imagine the pain of this time. Please know that through this medium, there is a huge amount of love and respect coming to you at any given moment, and I trust that will help to sustain you through this month.

I have read your Blog and found the story so fantastic, I was there, thanks also to your mastery of the language.

Love and Support to you in this time of sadness.

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The Bible contains 6 admonishments to homosexuals,and 362 to heterosexuals.This doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals, It's just that they need more supervision.Lynn Lavne

Bucko, on your 15th anniversary I wish you joy in reflecting on the love and wonderful experiences you shared with JM. And strength in your mourning. In my experience of mourning loss of many loved ones I find that each time I consciously mourn their loss, some the emptiness and pain is replaced with gratitude for the life lessons they taught me, and deeper appreciation of the gifts they brought into this world. I belive it is our calling to embody those gifts and perpetuate their giving in this realm. Much love and support to you this day.Aloha.

I had one of "those dreams" last night. He was living very simply, contemptuous of whatever life I'd found after him (in that smarmy French Communist way he had of deploring "bourgeois" ostentation, though I live a life of monastic simplicity.

He seemed like a dwarf...or more exactly like a kind of odd marionette, laying in bed, laying down the law as he always did with such exquisite exactitude. His mouth, in the dream, was filled with impossibly large false teeth, moving and clicking as he spoke such vicious invective.

He fell in love with me as a hedonist yet recoiled from my yearnings while disavowing his own, equally ferocious if not of even greater ferocity, even if he acted on them in a private, deeply shameful way. When I'd find the evidence (and there's always evidence), it was always reflected back on my (seemingly impossibly) satiated lust: never his own. I've never quite understood why he felt the need to be the voice of Moses as such an avowed atheist. But he was in life, and continues to be so in my dreams .

Whether self-flagellation or some other self-destructive urge, April returns every year, and with it these dreams...these memories. I've heard it said many times that only the best bottoms make it to the top. And Matty (who will loathe the resurrection of both this thread and these sentiments) has told me that it's a good thing I'm a top, because I'd be the most voracious bottom imaginable should i go the other way, so self-punishing I am.

My roommate/benefactor and I went out last Wednesday to one of those ultra-trendy downtown clubs, where everyone presumes to be younger and more beautiful than anyone else. We found the scene to be hideously sub-par and got ourselves shitfaced in a quest to find who could be more pointedly bitchy in his comments about our surroundings (I won, natch), being poured endless free drinks by the bartenders who knew us too well. As we were without doubt the only specimens of interest that evening, it became quite hilarious, especially as we passed from drunk to stupified.

We stopped for pizza on the way home and sat on the curb eating slices and sharing (yet another) Corona, in our expensive jeans and T-shirts, oblivious to the throng of people passing around us. I looked at him and asked, out of the blue, if he had any clippers at home. Responding in the affirmative, I said nothing until we staggered home.

Once inside our apartment, i looked at him and barked out: "Shave it off". Without questioning me, Brandon nodded and dragged me into his bathroom, where he stripped me naked and, removing the clippers, proceeded to shave my head, his I-Pod set into an audio player turned up high. Music blaring, stark naked, being shaved, i suddenly burst into involuntary tears. I tried to push him away, but he hugged me tight, even as his hand holding the clippers raked over my head until all my hair was gone, sobbing uncontrollably.

When he finished I tore from the bathroom and went out on the balcony, still stark naked, for a cigarette, still weeping. He joined me and we held each other fast as I let go in between puffs of smoke.

We'd spoken about this: he understood.

Logged

Blessed with brains, talent and gorgeous tits.

The revolutionary smart set reads The Spin Cycle at least once every day.

Sorry for your pain, Bucko. It's great to have been loved but then the hell you go through when you have lost it.At least you indeed know what it is like to have been loved, I have yet to go through that experience and often times doubt that I ever will. I will remember you on the 17th which is also my sister(who I hate)bday.

Bucko, My wife died May2ND, 1999 after 15years of marriage. We decided to keep our HIV a secret, not telling anyone. I know in my case, that, in an odd way, the hiv helped us become closer, and thus made us enjoy our lives to their fullest together. I can safely say, we had the best 15 years any couple could have possibly had.

Now comes the problem of living life alone. My life has never been anywhere near the same, as I'm sure yours hasn't either. Life now sucks, if I'm to be honest at all. She is gone. And she took a decent size chunk of my heart with her on that May 2ND day.

I try to capture some of my crushed heart back each and every day. I am so far behind. Some days I'm sure I'll never catch up....and my heart will never be whole again. And who knows, maybe that's the way its supposed to be.

The only thing I know what to do though, is to keep trying. This alone helps keep me going.

He must have been a very special man to you. I hope you find some peace of mind. I hope you can recover some of your heart as times marches on. Fondly,Jeff